Poet Laureate | The Naked Truth continues... The Naked Truth continues... Posted in: Artistic Creation , Historical Commenting , Life & Times . Tagged: Assia Wevill , Humphrey Spender , Poet , Poet Laureate , Stephen Spender , Suicide , Sylvia Plath , Ted Hughes , Tragic Tale . Leave a comment Its strange how knowledge of one thing can lead you to interests and knowledge of another. About a month or so ago I went out with my camera determined to grab the last few summer shots before the year and conditions turned all wet and mushy. The photos and the weather turned out fine and the knowledge I researched afterwards became the post called….”The sugar beet is long gone”. In that post I met and mentioned for the first time a photographer called Humphrey Spender,who happened to live near where I was shooting. Fast forward to today and I find myself watching a programme about the poet laureate Ted Hughes and heard about his traumatised life and also the fact he hung around with Stephen Spender,brother of the previously mentioned Humphrey.

The programme about Hughes was called: Ted Hughes Stronger than death and told the moving story of the tormented poet.He was British Poet Laureate from 1984 until his death in 1998.Ted Hughes, also known as Edward James Hughes, was one of the best English poets and children’s writers of his generation. Hughes wrote several important works which included, The Hawk in the Rain (1957), Crow (1970), Flowers and Insects (1986), and Birthday Letters (1998). Ted Hughes was born on August 17, 1930 in Mytholmroyd, West Yorkshire, England. His parents were William Henry and Edith Hughes. When he was seven, his family moved to Mexborough, South Yorkshire. As a kid, Hughes had fascination over animals and had the habit of collecting and drawing toy lead creatures. He attended the Mexborough Grammar School, where he received encouragement from his teachers to write. This helped him to develop his poetic skills. One of his earliest poems, “Wild West” and a short story was published in the grammar school magazine, The Don and Dearne in 1946.

Hughes whilst doing National Service was posted to an isolated three-man station in east Yorkshire as a ground wireless mechanic in the RAF. During this time, he had ample amount of free time to read books. In 1951, Hughes enrolled at Pembroke College to study English. He was mentored by M. J. C. Hodhart, who encouraged and supported him. But Hughes attended very few lectures during this period and wrote no more poetry. He transferred to anthropology and archaeology in the third year but didn’t excel as a scholar. During this time, Hughes published a poem in Chequer. Another poem, “The Little Boys and the Seasons” was published in Granta, under the pseudonym Daniel Hearing. After graduating from the university, Hughes worked a variety of jobs including working as a rose gardener, a night watchman and a reader for the British film company J. Arthur Rank. He also worked in a local zoo which gave him ample opportunities to watch animals closely, fulfilling his childhood fascinations for animals. Hughes and his friends held a party to launch St. Botolph’s Review on February 26, 1956. This student-made poetry journal had Hughes’s four poems in it.

At the party, he met for the first time American poet Sylvia Plath, who was studying at Cambridge on a Fulbright scholarship. Sylvia Plath had already published several poems and had won numerous awards. The two started dating and after duration of four months, they married at St George the Martyr Holborn, on June 16, 1956. When the couple spent their honeymoon to Benidorm on the Spanish coast, Plath’s mother accompanied them. The first few years of their married life went happily. They supported each other along with avidly pursuing their writing careers. Their poems were published in The Nation, Poetry and The Atlantic. Plath typed the manuscript of Hughes’s collection, collection “Hawk in the Rain” which won the poetry competition run by the Poetry centre of the young men and young women’s Hebrew association of New York. The book was published by Harper in September 1957 and Hughes received critical acclaim for his work. Then the couple moved to America where they taught at the University of Massachusetts. After spending couple of years in America, they returned to England and found a small flat in Primrose Hill, London.

Hughes got a job of writing programmes for the BBC as well as producing essays, articles, reviews and talks. Plath had her first child, Frieda Rebecca in 1960. In 1961, they bought the house Court Green, in North Tawton, Devon. The next year, 1962, Sylvia gave birth to their second child, Nicholas Farrar. Hughes began his affair with Assia Wevill in the summer of 1962 which led to his separation from Plath in the autumn of 1962. Plath moved to a new flat with her children. Following a state of depression and constant regular suicide attempts, Plath finally committed suicide on 11 February 1963. Hughes was devastated on her death but was heavily accused by the feminists of forcing Plath to commit suicide. Many feminists accused him of the murder of Plath and some even threatened to kill him. As her widower, Hughes was the legal executor of Plath’s personal and literary estates. In his supervision, Plath’s manuscripts were published. Many feminists questioned his authority over Plath’s literary legacy on grounds of being responsible for her suicide.

Six years after the suicide of Sylvia Plath, Assia Wevill also committed suicide on March 25, 1969. The next year in August 1970, Hughes married Carol Orchard, a nurse. They remained together for the rest of his life. They bought the house Lumb Bank near Hebden Bridge and also maintained the property at Court Green. The same year in October 1970, his book “Crow” was published. In 1984, he was made the Poet Laureate following the death of Sir John Betjeman. In later years, he wrote many children books and also collaborated with Peter Brook and the National Theatre Company. He also tutored at the Arvon Foundation which promotes writing education. He also wrote a number of translations of European plays, especially the classical ones. In 1997, he published Tales from Ovid which had a selection of free verse translations from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Just before his death, Hughes was appointed a member of the Order of Merit by Queen Elizabeth II.Ted Hughes breathed his last on October 28, 1998 while he was undergoing treatment for colon cancer.

His funeral was held on 3rd November 1998, at North Tawton church, and was cremated in Exeter Ted Hughes, 68, a Symbolic Poet And Sylvia Plath's Husband, Dies Ted Hughes, 68, a Symbolic Poet And Sylvia Plath's Husband, Dies Related Links Seamus Heaney Reads 'Source' by Ted Hughes By SARAH LYALL ONDON, Oct. 29 -- Ted Hughes, the British poet who was known as much for his doomed marriage to the American poet Sylvia Plath as for his powerful, evocative poetry, replete with symbolism and bursting with dark images of the Devonshire countryside in which he lived, died Wednesday, his publisher said. He was 68. The Associated Press Ted Hughes Mr. Hughes, Britain's poet laureate, had been suffering from cancer for about 18 months, but had told only his closest friends and had never discussed details of his illness, said Matthew Evans, the chairman of Faber and Faber, Mr. Hughes's publisher. "He felt that being ill was, for him, very private," Mr. Evans said. Mr. Hughes died at his home in North Tawton.

It was his illness, and his sense that time was running out, that persuaded Mr. Hughes to publish his last work, "Birthday Letters," a collection of poems about his fraught, fragile relationship with Plath, who committed suicide in 1963, soon after the two separated. After a silence of 35 years, in which Mr. Hughes had steadfastly refused to discuss Plath publicly or to respond to charges -- leveled in her own work and by her admirers -- that his callousness had led to her death, Mr. Hughes's decision to finally speak out was extraordinary. The book became a best seller in Britain and the United States, rare for a book of poetry, and was a personal turning point for Mr. Hughes. "It was a piece of work he wanted to get out before he died," Mr. Evans said in an interview. "He regarded it as being of personal importance. It was the nearest thing to an autobiography." The book, which drew a sometimes loving picture of a brilliant but emotionally unstable woman with a passion for suicide that seemed hard-wired into her very being, was widely praised. Friends of Mr.

Hughes saw it as a vindication of a man who had lived for decades in the shadow of his far more famous wife, taking on a guilt that should not have been his. But the book did not end the debate over the strange, terrible time surrounding Plath's death, already described in her own remarkable poems and journals, jagged cries of pain that at times laid the blame for her troubles on Mr. Hughes's broad shoulders. Many Plath scholars said that Mr. Hughes had behaved with remarkable callousness toward his wife, neglecting her genius and abandoning her and their two small children at a time when she was clearly crying out for help. Whatever the truth, Mr. Hughes, by then ill with the disease that would kill him, got the last word in the 35-year discussion. "The publication was a very important moment for him," Mr. Evans told the Press Association. "He was putting another side, and there was a great deal of understanding after that book was published." Edward James Hughes was born on Aug. 17, 1930, in Mytholmroyd, a small mill town in West Yorkshire surrounded by bleak, barren moors.

When he was 7, his family moved to Mexborough, a coal mining town to the south, and his father gave up his old profession -- making portable wooden buildings -- and bought a newspaper store. By then, the young Ted had developed a lifelong passion for the countryside, for animals, and for hunting, a passion that would inform his poetry in the years to come. "He wanted to capture not just live animals, but the aliveness of animals in their natural state: their wildness, their quiddity, the fox-ness of the fox and the crow-ness of the crow," wrote Thomas Nye in The Times of London. Surviving Isolation Steeped in Shakespeare After attending the local schools, Mr. Hughes served for two years in the Royal Air Force, working as a radio mechanic on an isolated three-man station in northern Yorkshire, with "nothing to do but read and re-read Shakespeare and watch the grass grow," he said. He then went to Cambridge, where he was celebrated as a clever, handsome student with great personal magnetism and an aura of brooding mystery that made him particularly attractive to women.

He took a number of jobs after graduation, working variously as a gardener, a night watchman, a zoo attendant and a script reader. A POEM BY TED HUGHES We walked across south London to Fetter Lane And your hotel. Opposite the entrance On a bombsite becoming a building site We clutched each other giddily For safety and went in a barrel together Over some Niagara. Falling In the roar of soul your scar told me -- Like its secret name, or its password -- How you had tried to kill yourself. And I heard Without ceasing for a moment to kiss you As if a sober star had whispered it Above the revolving, rumbling city: stay clear. -- "18 Rugby Street," from "Birthday Letters" More Ted Hughes Poetry Selections He met Plath, an American studying at Cambridge, at a party there in 1956. Their attraction was instantaneous.

Plath wrote in her journal: "That big, dark, hunky boy, the only one there huge enough for me, who had been hunching around over women, and whose name I had asked the minute I came into the room, but no one told me, came over and was looking hard into my eyes and it was Ted Hughes." The two got married just four months later, and woke each morning at dawn, brimming with ideas. "We would write poetry every day," Mr. Hughes once said. "It was all we were interested in, all we ever did. We were like two feet, each one using everything the other did." In 1957, Mr. Hughes published his first volume of poetry, "Hawk in the Rain," full of brutal, dramatic images of nature, to a chorus of praise in which he was acclaimed as the most important British poet to emerge after World War II. "Hughes's poetry signaled a dramatic departure from the prevailing modes of the period," wrote the critic Robert B. Shaw. "The stereotypical poem of the time was determined not to risk too much: politely domestic in its subject matter, understated and mildly ironic in style.

By contrast, Hughes marshaled a language of nearly Shakespearean resonance to explore themes which were mythic and elemental." A Brutal Winter Exacerbates Misery Though Plath found herself living in the shadow of her increasingly well-known husband, the two made up a celebrated and, for a time, happy literary couple, living briefly in the United States, where both spent several months writing at Yaddo, the artists' colony in upstate New York, and Mr. Hughes worked for a year as an English teacher at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Their life together in England was less successful. Plath found the Devon countryside, which her husband loved, heartless, bleak and uninviting. When they moved back to an unheated, uncomfortable flat in north London before one of Britain's bitterest winters in half a century, she fared no better, finding it increasingly difficult to beat back the suicidal tendencies that had plagued her on and off for years. As her relationship with Mr. Hughes unraveled, she became distraught and wracked by self-doubt. In February 1963, soon after Mr.

Hughes left her for his married lover, a fellow poet named Assia Wevill, Plath carefully laid out milk and bread for her sleeping children, put her head in the oven, and gassed herself. Reverence for Plath, Contempt for Hughes Plath's suicide had far-reaching and unexpected consequences. It drew a blaze of attention to her work, much of which had been written in a burst of despairing, frenzied creativity in the last months of her life. She became a feminist icon, celebrated as a passionately creative woman stifled by the confines of motherhood and by a husband who misunderstood and betrayed her. It also put terrible pressure on Mr. Hughes, who was vilified by many for what they saw as his complicity in Plath's death, but who never publicly tried to defend himself. It didn't help his reputation that, six years later, Assia Wevill killed herself and the couple's 2-year-old daughter, Shura, using gas, as Plath had. As executor of his late wife's estate, Mr. Hughes found himself caught in a thicket of conflicting interests.

With each new work by Plath that he published -- her journals, her "Collected Poems," which won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize in 1982, and various volumes of poetry -- he was accused of artfully omitting parts he found awkward or distasteful, of acting more like a censor than a champion. And when he admitted that he destroyed the last volume of Plath's journals, saying that he did not want the couple's children to see it, he unleashed a barrage of criticism that never abated. To make matters worse, Plath's posthumous fame threatened to completely overshadow his own career, particularly in the United States. Stymied by how fiercely he protected Plath's work -- he often refused to allow the use of quotations from her letters and poems -- some of Plath's biographers cast him as the villain in her life story. When he tried to read his own poetry in public, his readings were disrupted by pro-Plath protesters who accused him of murder. Plath's gravestone, which bore her married name, was repeatedly defaced, the "Hughes" chipped off. Plunging Into Writing With Roots in Nature But Mr.

Hughes, who married his second wife, Carol, in 1970, threw himself into his own writing, even as he became increasingly wary of intrusions into his private life and angry at the vast industry of people interested in him only because of Plath. He produced dozens of books of poetry and prose, writing for both adults and children. He also produced translations, wrote plays, campaigned for the environment, and edited volumes of poetry by Plath and others. His best-known poetry, which includes "Moortown," a group of 34 poems that describe Mr. Hughes's experiences working on a Devonshire farm with his father-in-law, is rooted in the natural world, and can veer abruptly from tender lyricism to staccato violence. Mr. Hughes's reputation went through ups and downs throughout his career. "He has been dismissed as a connoisseur of the habits of animals, his disgust with humanity barely disguised, labeled a 'voyeur of violence,' attacked for his generous choreographing of gore," wrote Carol Bere in the Literary Review.

"Others consider him to be the best poet writing today -- admired for the originality and command of his approach; the scope and complexity of his mythic enterprise; and the apparent ease and freshness with which he can vitalize a landscape, free of any mitigating sentimentality." The Natural World Used Metaphorically Speaking to the Press Association today, the poet Andrew Motion, a longtime friend of Mr. Hughes, said he presented "a vision of England which managed to bring the whole of the history and traditional past into play with a present that is recognizably modern." Mr. Motion continued: "On the face of it, his poems are about animals, nature and wildlife, but careful reading allows us to see them as a metaphorical or allegorical way of reconciling past and present." The poems in "Birthday Letters," Mr. Hughes's often heartbreaking account of his relationship with Plath, were written much more simplistically, as straightforward narratives that behave like prose.

When the book was published, the poet's legion of friends, who knew him as a loyal and generous man who was almost bigger than life, with his imposing physical presence, his strong, eagle-like face, his enormous, bushy eyebrows and his thatch of thick unruly hair, said that he had finally succeeded in exorcising the ghosts of the past. In 1984, Mr. Hughes was made Britain's Poet Laureate, a high-profile but rather strange job that pays $112 and a case of wine a year, and requires the incumbent to write stately poems on solemn occasions like, in Mr. Hughes's case, the Queen Mother's 90th birthday and the death of the Princess of Wales. He won numerous awards for his work over the years, including the Whitbread Book of the Year prize in 1997 for "Tales From Ovid," a translation of "Metamorphoses." Earlier this month, he was awarded the Forward Poetry Prize for "Birthday Letters," but, in a sign of his weakening condition, sent a speech instead of accepting the prize in person. "I would far sooner be here with you than where I am," the speech said.

Earlier this month, Mr. Hughes became one of just 24 holders of an Order of Merit in Britain (new ones are awarded only when holders of the title die). His acceptance of the honor, in Buckingham Palace two weeks ago, was his last public appearance. He is survived by his wife and by his two children with Plath, Frieda and Nicholas. In an interview in 1993, five years before "Birthday Letters" was published, Mr. Hughes mused about the benefits of using writing to understand the past. For 25 years, he had been secretly working on his poems about Plath, and although he didn't mention her, he was undoubtedly considering whether it was time to break his long and painful silence. "It means the world becomes yours," he said. "If you don't do it, it drifts away and takes a whole piece of yourself with it, like an amputation.

To attack it and attack it and get it under control -- it's like taking possession of your life, isn't it?" Six Young Men | Sylvia Plath Six Young Men Six Young Men by Ted Hughes A comment from the people of his home town: Hebden BridgeAt first reading this poem is about the futility of war; particularly the first worldwar. Hughes's father had come through the First World War, psychologicallyscarred by his ordeal and the trauma of witnessing the slaughter of nearly all hisfriends and fellow soldiers at Gallipoli in 1915. Hughes's father was one of justtwo per cent of his regiment to survive.Newsnight Review critic Tom Paulin has pointed out that Ted Hughes, havingbeen born in 1930 belonged to 'that slightly different species' - a generation 'whotook in the blood of the First World War with their mother's milk, and who up totheir middle age knew Britain only as a country always at war, or inwardlyexpecting and preparing for war…'However, this poem does more than attack war. It is also about the knowledge of our own death and non-existence.

We are reminded that one day all that will beleft of us will be a smiling face in a photograph. Ted Hughes Edward James Hughes OM (17 August 1930 – 28 October 1998) was an English poet and children's writer , known as Ted Hughes . Critics routinely rankhim as one of the best poets of his generation. Hughes was British Poet Laureate from 1984 until his death.Hughes was married to the American poet Sylvia Plath , from 1956 until her death. She committed suicide in 1963 at the age of 30. His part in therelationship became controversial to some feminists and (particularly) Americanadmirers of Plath. Hughes himself never publicly entered the debate, but his lastpoetic work, Birthday Letters (1998), explored their complex relationship. Tosome, it put him in a significantly better light whereas, to others, it seemed afailed attempt to deflect blame from himself and onto a neurotic father fixation he ascribed to Plath.Hughes studied English , anthropology and archaeology at Pembroke College, Cambridge .

At this time his first published poetry appeared in the journal hestarted with fellow students, St. Botolph's Review , and at a party to launch themagazine he met Sylvia Plath . He and Plath married at St George the Martyr Holborn on 16 June 1956, four months after they had first met.Hughes and Plath had two children, Frieda Rebecca and Nicholas Farrar , but separated in the autumn of 1962. He continued to live at Court Green , North Tawton , Devon irregularly with his lover Assia Wevill after Plath's death on 11 February 1963. As Plath's widower , Hughes became the executor of Plath’spersonal and literary estates. He oversaw the publication of her manuscripts,including (1966). He also claimed to have destroyed the final volume of Plath’s journal, detailing their last few months together.

In his foreword to The Journals of Sylvia Plath , he defends his actions as a consideration for the couple'syoung children.On 25 March 1969, six years after Plath 's suicide by asphyxiation from a gas stove, Assia Wevill committed suicide in the same way. Wevill also killed herchild, Alexandra Tatiana Elise (nicknamed Shura), the four-year-old daughter of Hughes, born on 3 March 1965.In August 1970 Hughes married Carol Orchard, a nurse, and they remainedtogether until his death. He was appointed a member of the Order of Merit by Queen Elizabeth II just before he died. Séamus Heaney , speaking at Ted Hughes' funeral, in North Tawton on 3November 1998, said: “ No death outside my immediate family has left me feeling more bereft.No death in my lifetime has hurt poets more. He was a tower of tenderness and strength, a great arch under which the least of poetry'schildren could enter and feel secure. His creative powers were, asShakespeare said, still crescent.

By his death, the veil of poetry is rentand the walls of learning broken. Jonathan Bate on Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life - Home | Writers & Company with Eleanor Wachtel | CBC Radio Sunday December 06, 2015 Jonathan Bate on Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life Ted Hughes was an accomplished poet and writer, but most know him as Sylvia Plath's husband. Scholar Jonathan Bate delves into the British poet's complicated, remarkable life. (Worcester College, Oxford) Listen to Full Episode 52:18 Ted Hughes produced more than 40 volumes of poetry, children's books, stories, translations and criticism. In 1984, he was named Poet Laureate of England, and in 1998, just months before he died of cancer at the age of 68, the Queen presented him with the Order of Merit. Yet, to some people, Ted Hughes is primarily known as the husband of Sylvia Plath, his wife of less than seven years.

Hughes - a large, attractive man from Yorkshire - has been described as a kind of Heathcliff, "a gentle giant and a monster." This was only enhanced by the appearance - just months before his death - of an extraordinarily confessional volume, Birthday Letters, about his relationship with Sylvia Plath. Drawing on new archival material and private journals, Shakespeare scholar Jonathan Bate has produced a biography called Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life. Eleanor Wachtel spoke to Bate at Oxford University, where he teaches. ON WHAT DREW HIM TO TED HUGHES' POETRY I was always a bit of a country boy and I think it was the way that he wrote about the natural world around us. He had an extraordinary eye for the vitality of nature, but also a completely unsentimental view of nature. There's a lot of poetry we read as children that is what I think of as 'fluffy bunny' poetry. Ted Hughes' poetry is not like that. He kind of knows that nature is red in tooth and claw. He's fascinated by not only beautiful creatures, but also dangerous creatures.

He writes wonderfully about birds of prey, about foxes and crows, and there was just something about that kind of raw, natural energy. There's an incredible poem about thrushes pecking on grass in order to catch worms and the violence of that action. He just catches it with extraordinary force. ON THE MISSING PAGES IN HUGHES' NOTEBOOKS When Hughes sold his first archive to Emory University, he said he was just holding back a few things he was still working on. Emory was quite happy about that and assumed he was holding back a small amount of material. But what he was working on was Birthday Letters, and what I discovered in the British Library Archive is that he had been working on that for nearly 30 years. I found hundreds and hundreds of pages of drafts, and many poems that were never included in the published version. One of the things that I found puzzling when I was in the Emory Archive was that in many of the notebooks there were pages ripped out. What I discovered in the British Library, in the second archive, was that those ripped-out pages contained intimate journal entries, meditations, confessions, very raw material about his own life.

So what he obviously did when he was preparing the first archive, shortly before his death, is he went through his notebooks and where there were rough drafts of poems and ideas for writing, he left it in. But where it was more personal material, he ripped it out. ON THE AFTERMATH OF SYLVIA PLATH'S DEATH I've taken a lot of stick from reviewers because I say in the book that, in some sense, Hughes' infidelity to later women was a form of fidelity to Sylvia. But what I meant by that was that there was something about the intensity of that bond with Sylvia, that sense of two beings becoming one, that he felt was so explosive, so intense that the only thing that could follow from it was death, Sylvia's death. He never wanted to replicate that; he always wanted to keep some part of himself free of commitment. In some senses, I do think he was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Jonathan Bate's comments have been edited and condensed. Music to close the show: "Quatuor Op. 41 No.

1" composed by Robert Schumann, performed by Cherubini Quartett, from the album Schumann: Die Streichquartette; Klavierquintett. Related Stories Savage Nature: The Life of Ted Hughes - Poetry Savage Nature: The Life of Ted Hughes One of the most important poets of the post-war period, Edward James Hughes (1930-1998), was drawn towards the primitive. He was enchanted by the beauty of the natural world, frequently portraying its cruel and savage temperament in his work as a reflection of his own personal suffering and mystical beliefs - convinced that modern man had lost touch with the primordial side of his nature. Born in Mytholmroyd, a remote mill town in West Yorkshire, Ted (as he was known to his friends and family) was enormously affected by the desolate moorland landscape of his childhood, and also by his father's vivid recollections of the brutality of trench warfare. Indeed, his father, who was then a carpenter, was one of only seventeen men from his regiment to have survived at Gallipoli during the First World War. At the age of seven his family moved to Mexborough (also in Yorkshire), where his parents opened a stationery and tobacco shop.

Here he attended the local grammar school, where he first began to write poetry - usually bloodcurdling verses about Zulus and cowboys - before doing two years' national service in the Royal Air Force. He later won a scholarship to Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he started reading English Literature but switched to archaeology and anthropology, subjects that were a major influence on the development of his poetic awareness. Here he immersed himself in the works of Shakespeare, W.B. Yeats and read Robert Graves's "The White Goddess" (1948). Following his graduation in 1954, he moved to London, where he had a number of interesting jobs, including zoo keeping, gardening and script reading for J. Arthur Rank. He also had several of his poems published in university magazines. In 1956 he and some Cambridge friends started up a literary journal called St. Botolph's Review. It lasted for only one issue but at the inaugural party Ted met his future wife, the then unknown American poet, Sylvia Plath.

Much has been written about the Hughes/Plath relationship since that first portentous meeting, but few can doubt that these two brilliantly creative people were enormously attracted to one another, almost from the moment they were first introduced. Within just a few short months they were married and living in the USA, where Hughes taught English and creative writing at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. And before the year was out, he had won an American poetry competition, judged by W.H. Auden, Sir Stephen Spender and Marianne Moore. Hughes once said of this contented period: "We would write poetry every day. It was all we were interested in, all we ever did." ? Ted Hughes Plath assisted him with the preparation of his first collection, The Hawk in the Rain (1957), a work that was quite extraordinary in its treatment of natural subjects. He continued to live in America for the next few years, being partly supported by a Guggenheim Foundation grant, before returning to England in 1959.

He then went on to win the Somerset Maugham award and the Hawthornden prize for his second book, "Luperca"l (1960); confirming his reputation as one of the most important poets of the post-war period. The next few years of Ted's life have since become the subject of much biographical speculation. However, the simple facts are that he and Plath had two children and moved to Devon in 1961. Their marriage began to disintegrate shortly thereafter and Hughes started an affair with Assia Wevill. He split from Plath and she committed suicide in her London flat in 1963. In 1969 Wevill also killed herself and their child. He married Carol Orchard in 1970 and spent the rest of his life trying to protect his and Plath's children from the media. Hughes published only children's poetry and prose in the years following the death of his first wife. His next major work was "Wodwo" (1967), which took its title from a character in the medieval romance "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight", and highlighted his increasing interest in mythology.

He travelled to Iran in 1971, where he wrote the verse/drama "Orghast" in an invented language. Some of his other collections include "Crow" (1970), "Cave Birds" (1975), "Season Songs" (1976), "Gaudete" (a long poem on fertility rites, 1977), "Moortown" (1979), "Remains of Elmet" (1979) and "River" (1983). Hughes was also one of the originators of the Arvon Foundation and was awarded an OBE in 1977. In 1984 he was appointed Poet Laureate and went on to publish "Rain-Charm for the Duchy and other Laureate Poems" (1992). Then in 1995 he composed a poem about Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, for her 95th birthday, likening her to a six-rooted tree.

He also wrote many reviews and essays, some of which were collected in "Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being" (1992), "A Dancer to God: Tribute to T.S. Eliot" (1992) and "Winter Pollen: Occasional Prose" (1994). In addition to all this he also wrote many wonderful plays and books for children, including his remarkable fantasy "The Iron Man". And when, just months before his death, Hughes released "Birthday Letters", a collection of poems about his life with Sylvia Plath, it became an immediate bestseller throughout the English speaking world and was widely praised for its searing honesty. Ted Hughes died of cancer on 28th October 1998, having just been appointed to the Order of Merit. Andrew Motion followed him as Britain's Poet Laureate. About The Author Paula is a freelance writer who has contributed articles, reviews and essays to numerous publications on subjects such as literature, travel, culture, history and humanitarian issues. She lives in North Wales, is a staff writer for Apsaras Review and the editor of two popular online guides. You can read her r�sum� at: .

Obituary: Ted Hughes | The Independent Obituary: Ted Hughes Friday 30 October 1998 00:02 BST Click to follow The Independent Culture WHEN SIR John Betjeman died in 1984, it was widely felt that his obvious successor as Poet Laureate would be Philip Larkin. Larkin, however, made it abundantly clear that he would refuse the position, and the availability of Ted Hughes seemed at the time providential. His subsequent conduct of the office made it seem that he could only ever have been the logical choice. Not only did this imposing, craggily handsome Yorkshireman look the part - more so than any Laureate since Tennyson - but he used the post to continue on a more public stage his campaign for the imagination and against what he saw as our despiritualised and disembodied civilisation. The Laureateship became significant in an almost unprecedented way. The division between the public and private faces of the poet was none the less profound, partly because of a temperamental desire for privacy, partly because of the catastrophes which haunted his adult life. Hughes was born in Mytholmroyd, Yorkshire, in 1930.

In a prose reminiscence he recalled how a much older brother would take him out shooting, "and I had to scramble into all kinds of places collecting magpies and owls and rabbits and weasels and rats and curlews that he shot". His earliest encounters with nature were associated with a seemingly natural violence. At the same time, the child Hughes fished daily, beginning what was to be a lifetime sport. Violence of another kind was inscribed into his family history. Hughes's father was a survivor of Gallipoli, who seems never to have recovered from the horror of his experiences. Hughes was to remember combing his father's hair; "After mother's milk," he wrote, This was the soul's food. A soap-smell spectre Of the massacre of innocents. So the soul grew. A strange thing, with rickets - a hyena. No singing - that kind of laughter. Behind these grim lines we can hear a vehement repudiation of Wordsworth's "Fair seedtime had my soul". Hughes was eight when his family moved to Mexborough, an industrial town, where his parents opened a small shop selling tobacco and stationery.

Appalled, his brother left home to become a gamekeeper, but Hughes looked back on the move with gratitude because soon he discovered first a farm, then a private estate, on which he could continue his exploration of the natural world in solitude. "My friends were town boys, sons of colliers and railwaymen, and with them I led one life, but all the time I was leading this other life on my own in the country. I never mixed the two lives up. I still have some diaries that I kept in those years: they record nothing but my catches." Early, he learnt the privacy essential to poetry, which he began to write when he was 15 and attending the local grammar school. Hughes's natural ability in literary studies led to his winning a scholarship to Pembroke College, Cambridge, where for his first two years (1951-53) he read English. He enjoyed it, but found writing essays increasingly difficult until, late in his second year, after unsuccessfully wrestling half the night with an essay, he went to bed and had a dream. What he saw was "a fox, but the size of a wolf".

The creature approached Hughes's desk and "spread its hand - a human hand as I now saw, but burned and bleeding like the rest of him - flat palm down on the blank space of my page. At the same time it said, `Stop this - you are destroying us.' Then as it lifted its hand away I saw the blood-print . . . in wet, glistening blood on the page." Hughes changed course and spent his final year reading Archaeology and Anthropology. After completing his degree, Hughes drifted for a couple of years, living largely in London, working for a time in Slough, revisiting Cambridge. He was variously a rose- gardener, a zookeeper, a nightwatchman. In 1955 Hughes met, and in 1956 married, an American poet two years younger than himself, Sylvia Plath. At first they lived in Cambridge, where Hughes worked as a teacher, then in 1957 went to the United States. Hughes taught at Amherst, Plath at Smith, then they spent time together at Yaddo, the writers' retreat.

However, Plath had entered Hughes's work for a prestigious American competition which he won, and the publication of The Hawk in the Rain (1957) established him immediately as a leading younger British poet. The linguistic energy with which Hughes conveyed sense-experience owed something to Hopkins, but his voice was all his own. At the same time, some critics feared that the poet was attracted to violence in an amoral, Nietzschean way, a charge which echoed through the whole of his career. In December 1959 the young couple returned to England, where they lived first in London, then in Devon. In April 1960 they had a daughter, Frieda, and in January 1962 a son, Nicholas. The publication of Lupercal (1960) had confirmed Hughes's reputation and won him further prizes. The marriage, though, became increasingly troubled. Plath had been hospitalised after a suicide attempt well before she met Hughes. Paradoxically, his influence on her as a writer was entirely beneficial, but his interest in shamanism perhaps led her to attempt to confront her demons too nakedly.

In a late poem, Hughes remembered bitterly the writing- table he made for her and "the sweat I soaked into / Finding your father for you and then / Leaving you to him." The formal, ambitious, inert clockwork of Plath's earlier poems was replaced by something much darker, stranger, maybe never completely achieved but unforgettable in the work of the last months of her life. As the marriage deteriorated, Hughes fell in love and began a relationship with Assia Wevill, the wife of a fellow poet. Plath was undone by his infidelity, and in October 1962 she asked him to leave. In December she moved to London with their children. During January 1963 Plath became seriously depressed, and on 11 February she committed suicide by gassing herself. Whether she meant to die or not is still a vexed question. Hughes destroyed the final volume of her journal because he did not want her children to see it, but with his sister Olwyn he oversaw the publication of the writing which secured her legend. Plath's death was over the years to force Hughes into reclusiveness.

As her reputation grew, and she became a feminist icon, many women came to see him as responsible, as an archetypally bad patriarch. Her grave was repeatedly defaced (to remove her married name) and Hughes's public appearances were susceptible to disruption, which meant that a charismatic performer was largely lost to the poetry- reading circuit. Hughes was entirely successful in protecting the privacy of his and Plath's children into adult life but the dignified silence with which he largely confronted his accusers never satisfied them. Tragedy redoubled itself when Assia Wevill gassed herself and Shura, her daughter by Hughes. Hughes's writing deteriorated: his next adult volume, Eodwo (1967), has some spectacular moments but is distinctly uneven, while Crow (1972) is his spectacular worst. In the interim, though, he had begun what was to be an extremely successful career as a writer for children. The Iron Man (1968) has proved an enduring favourite. He began writing plays and continued to write prose fiction, though neither is of great importance to his reputation. Hughes played a major part in the establishment in 1968 of the Arvon Foundation.

Under its auspices thousands of aspirant writers have received professional tuition on residential courses; indeed, for some years he lent the foundation a cottage he owned at Lumb Bank, in Devon. His Poetry in the Making (1967) gathered a series of radio talks on creative writing for the young. Hughes's permanent commitment to poetry in education rested on his belief that through writing we could get back in touch with the souls and bodies repressive modern rationalism had stolen from us. Crow, dedicated "In Memory of Assia and Shura", is a caricaturist's scream of horror. Hughes explained it as an example of trickster mythology, but no amount of theoretical underpinning can redeem the volume's thin rhetoric. Yeats defined rhetoric as the will doing the work of the imagination, and the unevenness of Hughes's later writing can be explained by the tension between the two. Cave Birds (1975) is as harsh and willed as Crow. Gaudete (1977) is a quasi-religious horror story set in an English village, almost unintelligible as narrative but with some firm descriptive moments.

Remains of Elmet (1979), originally a collaboration with the photographer Fay Godwin, is a set of Yorkshire poems which are often very moving. In 1970 Hughes married Carol Orchard, with whom he lived happily in Devon until the end of his life: in Moortown (1979) he finally returned to poetic form. The title sequence was a verse journal of Hughes's life working on the Devon farm owned by Jack Orchard, Carol's father. Shorn of all mythology, these poems simply give us the experience they record with an astonishing directness. The other poems in the book were still troublingly uneven, though, and it was not until River (1983) that Hughes produced a book of uniform power. River contains the poems of a fisherman, beautifully observed, fanciful, delicate and exact. Wolfwatching (1969) was again very patchy. In 1992 Hughes collected his Laureate poems as Rain-Charm for the Duchy. The title poem is magnificent: the others record a heroic attempt and ultimate failure to establish a new courtly idiom.

In subsequent years, the republication of Hughes's poems in new editions (all his animal poems together, for instance), had given a feeling that the decks were being cleared. New Selected Poems (1995) added to this impression, though it closed with new poems which seemed to reflect on the two relationships which had ended in suicide. Astonishingly, what followed was masterwork. Tales from Ovid (1997) took 24 passages from Ovid and recast them in Hughes's idiom. The book was a distinguished addition to the tradition of imitation. Then, early this year, Birthday Letters was published unannounced. For more than 25 years, it emerged, Hughes had been writing about his relationship with Sylvia Plath (a handful in New Selected Poems), and now he gave the story as he saw it. Critics made the highest comparisons - for instance, with Hardy's "Poems of 1912-13", also about a dead first wife. Hughes's reputation and the fascination of his subject made an early over-reaction likely, but in this case the poems deserve their renown.

Hughes had never focused on life between humans in this way before, and the sheer pain he recorded moved readers to tears. Their effect in the classroom, with readers who knew nothing of Plath, was more overwhelming than that achieved by any of his much-taught earlier writing. Hughes's concern with the environment puts him in the mainstream of much modern thought. His belief that the women's movement reflected the unleashing of primeval forces was a little more eccentric, though, and in Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being (1992) Hughes revealed an almost private world of abstruse learning and mythological speculation which was startlingly irrelevant to its subject. His selected essays, Winter Pollen (1994), offer a calmer account of what was none the less a very singular world- view. Hughes ably cleared his love of natural energy from the charge of loving violence for its own sake. Raising one's eyebrows at the wilder reaches of his thought seems as irrelevant as noting his archaic and ardent royalism. These things were as necessary to his imagination as the spirit- world was to Yeats, and his best work rises free of them.

When time has winnowed the harvest of an extraordinarily productive career, a substantial body of very remarkable verse will be left. Ted Hughes wrote great poems in a time which cared little either for greatness or for poetry. So doing, he conferred dignity on the Laureateship which was rightly his. It seemed only right that in August the Queen appointed him to be one of the 24 members of the Order of Merit, an honour in her personal gift. He was invested by her as OM 12 days before he died. Edward James Hughes, poet: born Mytholmroyd, Yorkshire 17 August 1930; OBE 1977; Poet Laureate 1984-98; OM 1998; married 1956 Sylvia Plath (died 1963; one son, one daughter) (one daughter deceased by Assia Wevill), 1970 Carol Orchard; died London 28 October 1998.

Ted Hughes | Calderdale Council Ted Hughes 'Crowing' about our local Laureate' Born on the 17th August 1930 at 1 Aspinall Street, Mytholmroyd, Ted Hughes would become the nation's Poet Laureate. Hughes later remembered living out his early years in the twin shadows of Scout Rock and Mount Zion Methodist Chapel, both of which overlooked his home. The youngest of three siblings, he attended Burnley Road Primary School. His father worked at a joiner’s yard near Hebden Bridge Station. During his years in Mytholmroyd,Ted was highly influenced by his brother Gerald’s interest in hunting, mythology and the land. When he was eight years old, however, the family moved to Mexborough in South Yorkshire; Gerald left home and his sister Olwyn subsequently guided him into a closer relationship with literature which saw his graduate from Mexborough Grammar School to Cambridge University. Hughes found studying – rather than creating - English Literature too stifling, however, and after a memorable personal experience switched to Archaeology and Anthropology. At Cambridge he met the American poet Sylvia Plath and they married in 1956.

Discord in their marriage led to separation and ultimately to Sylvia’s suicide in 1963; she was buried in the Hughes family churchyard at Heptonstall. Ted Hughes retained links with the upper Calder valley and in 1968 he bought a former mill owner's house at Lumb Bank near Heptonstall, which was later taken on by the Arvon Foundation as a centre for creative writing. For some, his relationship issues seem to have been of more interest than his poetry, which distracts from a figure whose contribution to English literature, as well as environmental conservation, has been wide-ranging and influential. His reputation as a poet became established in the 1960s and was affirmed by numerous awards through the rest of his life, such as the Queen's Medal for Poetry in 1974. He was also recognised for his prose works. In 1977 Hughes was awarded the O.B.E and in 1984 he was given the highest accolade - the title of Poet Laureate, the youngest person to be granted the title since Tennyson. he held this post until his death, and was the last poet to hold the title for life.

In 1998 he received the Queen’s Order of Merit, an honour only held by 24 persons at any one time. A few months later, in October 1998, Hughes died at his home in N Tawton, Devon. He had been suffering from cancer. His ashes were scattered, and a memorial stone laid, at the source of the River Taw on Dartmoor, eight miles from the nearest road. Hughes’ local connections were expressed in his collection Remains of Elmet (later republished with extra poems as Elmet). The Elmet Trust was established in Mytholmroyd to recognise the symbiotic relationship between the village and the poet, and organises an annual Ted Hughes Festival. Calderdale Libraries has a full collection of works by both Hughes and Plath. For a list of items currently in stock look in our Online library catalogue If you are a Calderdale library member, or using a Calderdale library, why not find out about other historical figures, by searching the online Oxford Dictionary of National Biography . Simply enter a person's name or a place in the search box.

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Question: Which Poet Laureate became a member of the Order of Merit in 1998 but died only two months later?
Answer: Ted Hughes